Erin's Interview, Part 2

The Designer of the Month for January is yarn designer and spinner, Erin Jepson. This is the second part of her interview. You can see the first part here.

What is your favorite color / texture combination?
My favorite color combo is a heartbreaking collection of autumnal oranges, browns, and reds with a hint of teal or turquoise thrown in for good measure. Actually, any surprising combination makes my heart beat faster. I love it when a color shows through just enough to make you fall in love with it but not so much that you grow tired of it. Uniformity isn’t what I’m after in a yarn project--surprise is more like it.

As far as a favorite texture combination, I’m not sure I can put my finger on just one. When I’m plying a yarn against itself, I prefer the clean lines you get from a super wash wool (merino, BFL, and corriedale are my favorite super wash options). However, if I’m spinning up a super bulky yarn to be left as singles or plied with thread, I think more texture is best. I love locks of wool spun into an otherwise smooth yarn. When knit up, those locks of wool are little pockets of love that the spinner has left there for the knitter.

Do you have a type of project that you lean towards for knitted or crocheted examples of your yarn? Do you prefer knit or crochet for your yarn?
Because my yarn has a tendency to have short repeats of colors, I prefer items like hats, mittens, wrist warmers, neck warmers, or scarves to show off the rows of colors. I’ve never used my yarn, or had a customer who has used my yarn, for shawls or sweaters, so I’d be interested to see how that would turn out. I love my yarn no matter how it’s used… knitting, crocheting, weaving, sitting in a bowl to look pretty… it’s all a good ending for my yarn.

Erin's yarn made up in Tied Up and Twisted (free pattern).
How do you conceptualize your designs?
It’s all in my head… for the most part. I often name my yarns based on images from my memory before dyeing up the fiber to spin them with. I’ve found that a catchy name is just as important as a gorgeous yarn. So if I can come up with a winning name and yarn to match, I’ve got a great item to sell or gift. However, I have been known to be inspired by a great picture. One of my best-selling dyed tops was based on a photograph I saw online. While each project comes out different, I’ll always remember that picture as inspiration.

Where do you do your best design work?
I do my best design work in nature. If colors and texture naturally go together in real life, then they work for yarn as well. A walk through the woods or drive through the mountains almost always results in a new yarn creation.

Who or what was your earliest inspiration that started you on your way to being the designer you are today?
You know, there wasn’t a “who” that dropped me into this crazy world of yarn. However, my mom was always so supportive of any creative and crafty endeavor that I embarked on. She was always the one who pushed me to begin selling jewelry on Etsy. Without that experience on Etsy, I might never have found the handspun yarn that led me to the creative outlet I have today. So I suppose it was my mom… and all of the wonderful enablers out in the yarn world spinning up beautiful yarns and dyeing up beautiful fibers to play with.

Do you have any advice for spinners who are new to designing yarn?
Don’t be afraid of fiber. Play with it, spin it up, do crazy things, go wild and have fun. Know that even experienced spinners have frustrating days behind the wheel. While a lot of spinning is touch and feel, I firmly believe that some wheels can have minds of their own and will play games with you. Also, some colors just never look good together unspun, but spun up, they play with each other and dance across your knitting needles so don’t lose hope when you’re gifted a less than beautiful pile of wool. Spin it before you cast it off. And lastly, ugly yarn can always be used to tie up your tomato plants in the summer, and ugly wool still has life as a natural doll or pillow fill. Ask me how I know...


Here are more of my favorite yarns by Erin:

Telltale Heart

Bookworm

Twilight Wakes











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You can keep up with Erin by visiting her blog, http://knittinghands.blogspot.com.
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Designer of the Month: Erin Jepson

This month, we're having a change of pace--instead of a pattern designer, I wanted to feature a yarn designer. As lovers of yarn, I think knitters and crocheters owe a lot to those marvelous artists who design and create our medium.

Erin Jepson
First, let me say that the photos in this post don't do Erin's yarns justice. When you see them for real, you want to grab them all up and eat 'em... or maybe knit them... or crochet. Erin is a brilliant young woman who, in addition to having a degree in music performance, rubs elbows with the likes of Yo-Yo Ma and Manheim Steamroller as a matter of, oh, just doing her job at Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville, Arkansas. That, coupled with living in one of the most beautiful spots in the country, she is a yarn-lover's dream come true. Her color and texture combinations go from darkly brooding to sweetness and light and back again in a matter of a few yards of plied, yummy yarn.

You can buy her yarn to have as your very own, from her Etsy store, Wooly Hands.

Here are some of my favorite yarns by Erin:

Rotten Fruits

Dark Crystal

Night Hike











Erin has kindly answered some interview questions for us, and she did such a great job of it, that I'm going to publish them in two parts. On the second Monday of this month, Part 2 will be posted. Here's the first:

How did you get started designing yarn?
In a nutshell, I basically fell into it. Although, you all are smart enough to know that isn’t entirely true. No one really falls into a hobby like this. It’s not like I was walking through the mall and said, “Oh look, a spinning wheel and sheep.” I’ll expand a bit… knitting with commercially spun yarns started to wear on me and I found myself scouring the Internet for gorgeous, handspun yarns. The LYS near me doesn’t carry a good selection of handspun yarns. What they do have is natural (brown… tan… more brown) or dyed after being spun and I prefer dyed before spinning and yarns with loads of color. Etsy.com provided me with a plethora of shops all dyeing and selling the most tempting and gorgeous yarns I have ever laid eyes on.

It didn’t take many months of buying yarn before the obvious next step presented itself. Why wasn’t I spinning my own yarns? Thankfully I surround myself with tons of supportive people and over the course of a Christmas, I found myself with a drop spindle and some wool. That led to my first spinning wheel 9 months later, then my 2nd and 3rd spinning wheels, a drum carder, boxes upon boxes of dyes. and fleeces upon fleeces of wool. Basically, I don’t do things small. I go all out. Spinning and designing yarns is just another example of that. Ask me about the time I was going to sell Mary Kay cosmetics and thought I would need $4,000 of product to get started. Yeah, I’m that person.

What is your yarn weight preference?
I prefer worsted weight yarns because most of my favorite handspun knitting projects are small, like mittens and hats. Worsted weight is perfect for things like that. However, those who own one of my scarves or neck warmers know I’m also a huge fan of bulky yarns. There is an element of surprise in a neck warmer knit from a super bulky, thread plied yarn. No two rows are the same. Now that I’ve said I prefer worsted and bulky, I’d like to add that I don’t necessarily like those better than the others--they are just what I enjoy spinning and using. If I were to knit up a lacy shawl, I’m sure I’d prefer some laceweight yarn. Ask me this question again in February and I’ll bet that my answer will be different.

What’s your favorite fiber to work with?
When it comes to wool, I adore BFL (Blue Faced Leicester), which will beat out any natural (I’m leaving out super wash wools for this answer) wool in my wool popularity contest. It’s sleek, easy to spin, and has a natural luster that the other wools don’t have. My favorite non-wool fiber is angelina. I have 2 drawers full of the sparkly stuff in plastic and metallic materials. I love the way the sparkle of the angelina plays against the matte finish of wool in a finished yarn.

What is your weapon of choice?
While I did start out with a drop spindle, I quickly moved to a wheel. I’m not an overly patient person, and if takes me more than one day to spin a yarn I’ll lose interest. Spinning wheels allow me the speed to finish a yarn in one sitting but also the flexibility to create some really amazing yarns. I currently use my Lendrum DT to spin most of the yarns I knit with and sell, but I also use a small, single treadle wheel from Heavenly Handspinning that is easy to carry from craft show to craft show.

You can find Part 2 of Erin's interview here.

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You can keep up with Erin by visiting her blog, http://knittinghands.blogspot.com.
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My Mother's Crochet Hook

The Blog Week question for today is... well, I'm not using it,* so here's the wildcard question: Do you have a particular knitting/crochet tool that you love to use?



Here is my knit answer: Yes, my favorite knitting tool is a crochet hook. It saves me when I have dropped stitches, and I love it because it was my mother’s. This is one of the earliest tools I remember seeing her work with... takes me way back to being, oh, a toddler probably.

This little steel hook has “0 Boye 0” written on one side of the grip, and “U.S.A. 10¢” on the other side. I do love it! From mother to daughter, it’s part of the legacy. Sigh.

If you want to see more posts from other bloggers participating in Blog Week, click here to find links:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=knitcroblowc&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

(Blog Week Wildcard tag: knitcroblowc)

* The Blog Week Day 7 yarn question just wasn’t going anywhere for me. I have yarns that I use a lot, but I’m not especially enthralled with them. When working on patterns that I’m designing, I try to use widely available, easy-to-care-for yarns that aren’t too expensive... but not 100% acrylic.